How do you measure the impact of conversion improvement on your site? Most marketers know the basics of how to calculate this, but might get confused when it came to details -- or do they? Astute readers will recall I began a series on calculating the impact of your continuous improvement efforts a few months ago, called “Making Millions From Losing Tests". Several readers wrote in privately asking for an even simpler example. It turns out that it’s the basic lift calculation that seems to be causing doubt, and therefore the detail work “feels shaky”, as one fellow put it. This [...]

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Pinterest, the visual-focused social sharing startup, has taken the online world by storm over the last year. According to the latest referral traffic and active user statistics as reported by Media Bistro, Pinterest has surpassed LinkedIn as the third most-popular social network in the world with a 145% increase in daily users since January 2012. What makes the story of Pinterest so unique is that accompanying its stratospheric growth are revenue and engagement metrics that have turned the social network into one of the few sources in the space that are actually delivering traffic and sign [...]

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In my last article, I wrote about getting back to the core of digital marketing effectiveness by focusing on the consumer.  That article was focused on the “why” of this issue -- namely, the massive digital divide between consumers engaging in real-time across channels and the marketers who are trying to reach and engage them, but often using digital marketing practices that are largely siloed and not executing in real-time. Today, we move past the problem and focus in on the “how” -- how to bridge that divide and reshape the current digital landscape. First, a short recap of the c [...]

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Today’s internet users are bombarded with content.  As a result, they are tuning out the noise and raising the bar on the content they choose to pay attention to. For social media marketers, this means that it is more important than ever to understand what content will resonate with target groups and which will fall flat.   Without good ways to identify the content preferences of target groups,  the only option is to throw marketing mud against the wall and hope that it sticks -- an approach that is costly, more likely to fail, and may damage the credibility of budding social media pr [...]

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Consumer behavior has been in constant flux since the beginning of the Internet, but perhaps more than ever before, consumers today are setting the pace for digital marketers with the rapid evolution in how they shop online, connect with friends, and engage with content and advertising. They are in a fluid state, flowing freely between channels and devices. And for all the “big data” our industry analyzes on a daily basis, one would think that we’ve gotten pretty good at measuring, listening and responding to these changes in behavior and preference. In this measurement-obsessed in [...]

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Last week, Google made further improvement to its Analytics platform by adding Site Speed reports to help users analyze their site’s page load times, and allowing for greater granularity on site performance than previously available. The new Site Speed reports allows marketers to measure the execution speed and load time of user-defined events, such as how quickly an image or resource loads, to how long it takes your site to respond to a button being clicked. To increase the usability of the reports, Google broke them down into four main tabs: Overview, Explorer, Performance, and Map O [...]

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Facebook provides a wealth of data that can be used to calculate many useful metrics not readily available in the standard Insights report (see last month's column for three examples).  Unfortunately, Facebook does not segment data on a monthly basis.  All Facebook data is segmented into daily, 7-day, or 28-day time periods. This means that Facebook metrics can’t be easily incorporated into monthly reports.  This is a problem not only for custom metrics that can be calculated using Facebook data, but also for the standard metrics displayed in the Insights interface.  For example, the [...]

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As I've mentioned in earlier articles, the biggest threat to effective improvement on a regular continuous basis is looking at too much data. The more metrics you're looking at, the less likely you are to follow through on any of the signals they're telling you. Less is always more. If you hear about a million people starving in the Sudan, you mind can't encompass the number; if you see a single homeless vet in a wheelchair asking for quarters, you're much more likely to feel pity and act to help him out. Similarly when you are looking at too many metrics from your analytics data stream, [...]

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Just over two weeks ago, Apple released the new iPad was to U.S. and international markets. Though it sports a new higher-resolution, retina screen, a better camera, and an improved chip-set, there seemed little difference between the new iPad and the second generation model, the iPad 2. And yet, despite the debatably minor technical improvements, the new iPad sold over three million units in the first four days on the market. Generally positive reviews across the board, and optimistic analyst estimates have propped up Apple’s share price to the point where it sits comfortably above $600. [...]

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The challenge of appropriately attributing online advertising's influence on a user exposed to multiple channels continues to slow the movement of additional ad spend by brands. That was one of the topics highlighted at the OMMA Global conference in San Francisco recently. While the historic battle cries of view-through impressions, click-based optimization and last-touch attribution are finally being dismissed and downplayed (as they should be), the push for viewable impressions to become the leading metric played a prominent role in the agenda. The challenges of online performance meas [...]

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As more and more marketing takes place on Facebook, it's important to master measuring results on the platform, and one of the most important tools for doing so is on the site itself and available for export -- Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights is a useful analytics tool that can help social media marketers create better experiences on brand pages and improve business results.  Many of the metrics provided by Insights are readily available right on your Facebook page (simply click on the “See All” Insights link featured prominently on the Admin panel of the brand timeline page).  F [...]

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Everyone knows the question: "What one [book|person|food|movie|etc] would you take with you to a deserted island?" That is to say, what one thing can't you live without? Most of us have a pretty narrow list. Perhaps it's a book you've read over and over again. Or your favorite cousin -- the one you would like as a friend even if you weren't related. Or chocolate chip ice cream (I assume the deserted island has a freezer and electricity!). Have you ever asked yourself that question about your metrics? What one metric in your business can't you live without? What measurement of success mus [...]

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As much as some would like to move past it, there's no denying that one particular metric still rules the world of online marketing -- the click-through. Sure, you're eventually trying to get to the conversion, the ROI, the high-margin purchase. But it all still starts with the click. Because clicks are so central to online marketing and commerce, it's important to understand the characteristics of the users that are most likely to perform that simple action. With this knowledge, marketers may maximize their monetization by ensuring they are targeting to the right customers and guaranteeing [...]

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Marketers' direct messaging options have proliferated, expanding from traditional mail and telemarketing efforts to now include a myriad of digital channels such as email, social media, SMS, and mobile applications. Expectations for relevant messages across multiple channels are higher than ever. How do you cope? With data and planning. Why cross-inform? First of all, consumers are demanding it. Today’s consumers are quick to point out when a business fails to recognize them as a customer or recognize a behavior they have already taken. But more importantly, cross-informed marketing effor [...]

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I’m often amazed at how naive companies can be about their online testing efforts. The bigger the company, it seems, the more disconnect there can be between the talented optimization team and the senior management. And that, as you might guess, often ends up undermining the revenue and efficiency improvements that come from continuous testing. This is part 1 of a multi-part column. In future columns, I’ll discuss why you want to celebrate every time you “lose” when testing -- which is really what I wanted to write about. But I realized it’s important to lay the groundwork for why [...]

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Why do apps matter? For the first time ever, Apple’s iOS surpassed Mac OS in terms of Web browsing market share, highlighting a shift of consumers focus towards mobile. The arrival of smartphones brought with it the “application age,” a time period in which over the last few years approximately one million of third-party applications have come to market, and revolutionized consumer services in the mobile device industry. Users can now manage their personal finances from their mobile devices, order groceries, check out where the latest movies are playing, and even plan their next v [...]

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The start of a new year is a popular time for resolutions. Many people resolve to eat better (read: ‘eat less’). Or exercise more. You know the drill. And right about now, three weeks into a new year, is when the vast majority of those resolutions start to break down. Of course, even among marketing cognoscenti new year’s resolutions rarely involve analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs) -- so I’d like to take this opportunity to outline a plan you can follow to slim down and shape up in 2012, metrics-wise. What Are Metrics For? Now, in many ways there’s a direct [...]

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Whether engaging in a multi-channel advertising campaign or simply trying to expand your online presence, Social Media is one platform marketers cannot afford to miss as we move into 2012. Several leaders have emerged as viable options for marketers to engage with their target audience to an extent which would not have been imaginable a decade ago. But how can a marketer maximize their returns for an advertising campaign centered in Social Media? In the following paragraphs, we will go through the different steps required to calculate the return on investment of social media users, and the [...]

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This has been the year of the social network, marked with the arrival of both major and minor players (Google+, UnThink), and the accelerating growth of existing platforms (Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, among others). As the social media landscape has evolved and branched out in different directions, Twitter has been one of the last leading social media power platforms to jump on the advertising bandwagon. This couldn’t come at more of an opportune moment; this past year, the amount of sharing on Twitter grew by 576% to make up a total of 13.5% of all sharing on the web. In the latte [...]

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A fairly large contingent of my colleagues attended the recent Masters of Marketing annual conference in Phoenix held by the Association of National Advertisers. For three days, 1700+ manager, director and C-level marketers from most of the county’s largest brands, as well as folks from many of the top ad agencies networked, shared and braved 100-degree “dry heat.” While many think of this gathering as the barometer of what’s going on in marketers’ minds, the anecdotes that were brought back to our office from this event exceeded our expectations. What’s The Buzz – Tell Me [...]

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